Chapter 11: The Third Degree
and a Talk with Cousin John

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book I: Early Years
Part Two–Young Man
                                      

Jesus rested in comfort for a week. During this time the high priest visited him once.

The older man sat on a marble bench beside Jesus, just outside the temple in a small ornamental garden.

“You have done very well, Jesus,” he said. “When your rest here is finished, will you return to Heliopolis and study at the school? Or would you prefer to stay with us a while and learn some of the priestly rituals of the second degree?”

Jesus spoke carefully. “Thank you, Holy One, for inviting me to stay. I wish to do this, but rather as one who is going through the third degree.”

The high priest looked off into the northern desert plain. The valley of the Nile glinted emerald with grass, and the far mouths of the Nile shone with light blue.

“No,” he said. “You will fail. We have just found you. We do not want to lose you so quickly.”

“Is it more difficult than the second degree?” Jesus asked.

The high priest looked at him sharply. “It is easier to take,” he told Jesus, “but also easier to fail. Ask me for no more information.”

“I am sorry, Holy One. But I am ready to take the third degree whenever you will allow it.” Jesus picked up a fallen leaf.

The high priest fidgeted slightly. “I am bound by our laws to tell you something, Jesus. Because of Judy’s request in this matter, all of us of the highest degrees have met and discussed whether or not a man so young may be allowed to take the third degree.”

Jesus waited.

The high priest frowned. “Against my own judgment, the council decided to allow Judy’s request. You may start your next degree whenever you are ready.” He cast a severe look at Jesus. “Understand, we are allowing this only because you are the predicted one.”

“I will start my new degree as soon as I may,” Jesus told him. He wriggled his bare toes in the thick green grass underfoot.

The high priest stood up and put his hands on his hips. “Finish your week of rest,” he said. “At the end of this time, a guide will come and get you.”

The old priest stretched out his arm, laid his hand on Jesus’ bowed head, and blessed him. Then he started to go.

But he hesitated. A tree bough bent toward him in the breeze as he turned back. “Are you really the predicted one?” he quietly asked.

Jesus’ head snapped up. The question, though quiet, was penetrating. “I don’t know.”

The old man nodded his head. “A better answer than most. Do not fail your test, Jesus. I wish to see you again.” He left quickly through the vine-covered gate of the small garden.

Several days later a middle-aged priest led Jesus to a high-ceilinged room he had never seen before. It was filled with book rolls.

Go look,” the priest said, pointing at the rolls. He smiled.

Jesus walked to the shelves and read several book titles on the shelf edges. “These are the mystery books of King Solomon!” he exclaimed. “Only a few copies of these books exist!” Judy had not let him read the Essene copy at Mount Carmel. She said he was not yet ready.

“Look there,” the priest suggested, his eyes sparkling. He pointed at a far shelf protected by a wooden grate of hard cedar.

Jesus looked through the holes in the grate at the labels inside. “The lost books of Moses!” He whirled toward the priest excitedly. “Are they real? Why don’t my people have them?”

The priest smiled happily. “Copies for all your scholarly centers are being made,” he told Jesus. “We found these books last year in an old, dry storage room at the top of the temple. Go ahead. Look!”

Jesus opened the grate and carefully began to draw one of the Moses book rolls out. He paused. He looked at the priest and frowned. “Why do you show me these? I thought I was to start my third degree.”

The priest bowed gravely. “This chance is part of your third degree.”

Jesus’ face lit up.

The priest raised a finger. “But you may study them only two hours a day,” he warned.

“Two hours! Jesus complained. “It will take me months to study them properly!”

The priest bowed again. “I will bring you food and water twice daily. You may go out to relieve yourself, provided you talk with no one and return here immediately.”

Jesus nodded vigorously. He looked around the book-lined room and saw a light wooden study table in one corner, and a sleeping mat in another. The room had a wonderful dry scent of well-kept, ancient manuscripts. He felt he could stay here a year and not complain.

“Goodbye,” the priest said. He left.

Jesus immediately began studying. He studied that day, the next, and each day that followed. Between study periods his mind overflowed with all that he read, thinking about it and meditating upon it. He had rarely been so excited. His scholar’s mind leaped easily back and forth from this new knowledge to things he already had studied in his years with Judy, connecting the new with the old. The days passed quickly. He hardly noticed them.

After he had been in this room a handful of days, an old priest whom Jesus had never seen before, wearing a dark-green silk robe, quietly came into the room.

Jesus was putting away one of the Moses manuscripts. He had just finished his two-hour study period and was preparing to sit at the study table and slowly recall everything he had read that day.

He bowed to the priest.

“Your eyes sparkle,” the priest said. He smiled at Jesus. “Do you like your studies so much, then?”

“Yes sir!” Jesus exclaimed, too exuberantly. He took a deep breath and let it out. “Yes, very much, sir. I am having an excellent time.”  

“Good!” The priest waved his hand toward a chair. “Please. Sit down. There is something I must discuss with you.”

They sat across from each other at the bare table.

The old priest leaned earnestly across to Jesus. “How would you like to study like this all the time?”

Jesus leaned forward quickly. “Could I?”

The priest nodded. “We can arrange it. But there is a price.”

Jesus blinked. “A price?”

“Yes. Let me explain. We will set you up with a complete library of any books you want, and your own school. In two years when you turn eighteen, you may become an official Doctor of the Laws in your own land, and teach students. You are an excellent scholar. You would attract many students. You could spread a new philosophy throughout your lands and maybe the whole world. All you have to do is give up seeking any more degrees in our temple.”

Jesus frowned. “Is this another trick like in the second degree?”

“It is no trick,” said the old priest, eyes alive with interest. “It is a test. We do not deceive you now, for you would see through it.”

“Why are you offering me this?” Jesus asked.

“It is part of the third degree. We offer each candidate the thing he most wants, to the extent we can give it to him. We offer some candidates money, others we offer power, or even a wife. Each man is offered that which he most desires.”

“Why haven’t you offered me the chance to travel?” Jesus asked.

The old priest smiled. “No, that is not your deepest desire. You wish to become your nation’s Messiah.”

Jesus started to protest.

“Wait!” the old priest exclaimed. “You hope for this. You also hope to do it by teaching everyone the things you have learned from books.”

The priest spread his hands. The beautiful silk sleeves of his robe caught the light where they rested on top of the wooden table.

“Who knows?” he told Jesus. “Maybe this is the way you are supposed to become the Messiah!”

Jesus shook his head. “I am not sure this is what I am meant to do.”

“That is for you to decide,” the priest answered. “Remember, though, this chance will never come again from us. We do not help people get what they want in the outer world, except at the time of their third degree. You can become one of the greatest scholars the world has ever known. You are capable of it. We offer you the worldly means. It is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get exactly what you have wanted.”

“No,” said Jesus. “I do not want something that might be wrong.” He glanced forlornly around him at all the ancient scrolls on their shelves.

“You could take it, Jesus, and later change your mind.”

“No, I do not want it now so I will not take it.”

The priest raised his eyebrows. “You are so sure! Won’t you even take a day to think about it, or consult your god or inner awareness?”

“Thank you for coming” Jesus said. “I do not accept the offer.”

The priest shook his head from side to side. “Would you so quickly dismiss such a chance?”

“I am not dismissing it. But a messiah should be much more than a scholar. If I am truly the Messiah, I must do much more than live in a library and teach philosophy. I know this from my studies.”

“What if you are not a messiah?” the old priest gently asked. He tapped his foot several times on the stone floor of the room.

Jesus became pale. “Then I am making a great mistake right now. If I am not the Messiah, I should be doing exactly what you suggest.”

“Try it out,” said the priest. “You don’t need degrees in the mysteries from Egypt.”

“I am here now.” Jesus stood up. “If I am the Messiah, I must learn the mysteries wherever I can find them taught. That is my way and my decision.” He lightly rested his hand on a shelf of book rolls near the table.

The old priest rose and bowed low. “Then I respect that decision, young man. I will go now.”

After the priest was gone, Jesus sat at the study table long hours in thought. He felt tired and lonely, as if a great weight were pressing on his shoulders. He had committed himself, more than he wanted, to becoming the messiah, one who lived by more than words alone. He hoped that he and all the others who held their almost impossible hopes for him were not wrong.

The next day he was given his parchment symbols for passing the third degree, and allowed to see his cousin John.

They were glad to see each other. They had been separated for many weeks. They decided to walk the perimeter of the great temple pyramid as the evening sun set and the stars of the Hunter rose in the sky. They walked outside the circle of stone huts and gardens against the temple walls. Their feet kicked up sand and dust as they strode along.

“Two degrees!” John exclaimed. His voice carried far through the desert night. “I didn’t think they’d let me take two right away!”

Jesus smiled. “You did very well, John.”

“I’m sure you did even better,” John said. “You took the first two degrees, didn’t you?”

Jesus nodded.

“Tell me,” John asked. “How were they for you?”

Jesus described them briefly.

John shook his head. His hair was much longer since their tests had begun. He had said he had no plans to cut it. He was becoming a man. Only boys and rich Sadducees cut their hair short, he said.

“That’s not at all what it was like for me in the first room,” John said. He grabbed a small stone and tossed it at a distant sand dune. “’Who are you?’ the priest asked me. The first day I said, “I am John the Forerunner.’”

He laughed. “That upset their plans!” he told Jesus. “They hadn’t heard about me. They had to go all the way to the high priest to find out what it meant.”

“Did that work?” Jesus asked.

“No. They wouldn’t let me out. So the next day I said, “I am the reincarnation of Elijah the Prophet!’”

Jesus mouth dropped open. “Are you?” he asked.

John shrugged. “According to some ancient holy books, that is who I am–if you are the Messiah.” He looked from under his eyebrows at Jesus.

Jesus hid his surprise.

“Well,” John continued, “that sent them scurrying again. All the way to the high priest a second time! But the answer was no. Absolutely. They didn’t care to comment on the truth or falsity of my assertion, they said. Whether I was Elijah or not, they still needed to know what I am.”

John shook his great head of hair. Moonlight glinted off of his dark curls.

Jesus smiled at him. “What did you finally do?” he asked John.

“I waited several days. Then I got tired of just sitting there. I started concentrating in the center of my breast like that writing on the wall suggested.”

“Did it work?” Jesus asked.

“No. So I tried concentrating the same way, but inside my head. Here.” He tapped his forehead between his eyebrows. “There was a drawing of a snake coming out of a man’s forehead on the other wall. That’s how I got the idea.”

Jesus nodded. He had seen it.

“”That’s when it happened,” John said. “Right smack in the middle of that closed room, I saw purple and white streaks of lightning everywhere. You know, the kind that are there but aren’t there. You can still see real things in the room, too. And suddenly I just knew–I felt–that I was close to God. Like I was inside of him.”

“Inside him?” Jesus asked. “It was the other way around for me.” A shadow crossed his face. He looked up. The high top of the pyramid had come between them and the moon as they walked.

“Yes,” John said. “That must be possible, too, for that is how I explained it the next day. The priest asked me, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘I don’t know who I am but God is in here.’”

John tapped his forehead again. “That was it,” he said. He put his hand out. “They passed me.”

“How about your second degree?” Jesus asked. “Was the dark bad for you, too?”

John smiled. In the night shadow cast by the pyramid, his teeth were a vague white blur.

“Yes and no.” He shook his head. “I spent most of the time praying. I started in a whisper. Each day I got louder. Pretty soon I was shouting and yelling my head off and marching arund the room.”

“Did you get those visitors?” Jesus hesitantly asked. His sandal accidentally kicked up an old, sand-clogged stick.

John looked at him and scowled. “Those two? I threw the water jug at them. I picked up the other jar to throw, too, but they were gone by then. That’s when I finally decided they were real, and not just fantasies of my mind.”

Jesus laughed. “And you didn’t leave the room once?”

“No,” John answered. “I spent the last few days orating to no one, and talking to God as loud as I could. I couldn’t have done it quietly like you. Did you finish your second degree just last week, too?”

“No,” Jesus answered. I finished it three weeks ago.”

They passed suddenly beyond the shadow of the pyramid. The moon lit up both their boyish faces.

“Three weeks ago!” John exclaimed. “But that means you must have finished your first degree in one day, and with no rest after it!”

“Yes."

John looked at him in amazement. “What have you been doing these three weeks? Waiting for me?”

“I took the third degree,” Jesus answered.

John stopped walking and stood with sand trickling over the edge of his sandals. He stared at Jesus. “You couldn’t have. They don’t let anyone under eighteen years old take it. Even I have to wait.”

“Even you, John?” Jesus looked him in the eye.

John blushed and turned his eyes to the unbroken reaches of the desert sands.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I am used to doing things sooner and better than everyone else. I have, it seems, met my match in you.”

This time Jesus blushed, slightly.  “I am not better or worse than you, Cousin,” he told John. “Only different.”

John faced him. “Maybe the old Essenes are right, Jesus. Maybe we are who they want us to be.”

“We need a few more years of studying,” Jesus told him.

John nodded. He reached down and scooped up a handful of warm sand. He let it trickle slowly through his fingers. “And a few more years of work, my cousin. We both must know God better.”

“And our own hearts,” Jesus added. “Without that, we will be lost.”

He put his arm around John’s shoulders as the two of them came within sight of the stone hut in which they were staying. Soon the two of them were preparing for bed.

The next day they rode together to Heliopolis on Egyptian horses loaned to them for the day. They took the horses right up to the edge of the Nile, and then plunged off the animals and into the water, soaking themselves in the heat of the afternoon. Several hours later they arrived at the priestly school, happy and dry.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Aug. 2020.